Abstract
In Romania, the communist regime promoted an official policy of gender equality for more than 40 years, providing equal access to education and employment and restricting pay differentiation based on gender. After its fall in December 1989, the promotion of equal opportunities and treatment for men and women did not constitute a priority for any governments of the 1990s. This paper analyzes both gender and occupational wage gaps before and during the first years of the transition to a market economy and finds that the communist institutions did succeed in eliminating the gender wage differences in female- and male-dominated occupations but not in gender-integrated occupations. During both regimes, wage differences were, in general, much higher among workers of the same gender working in different occupations than between men and women working in the same occupational group, and women experienced a larger variation in occupational wage differentials than men. JEL codes: J24; J31; J71; J78; P26; P27
Highlights
The communist regimes in Eastern Europe institutionalized the principle of “equal pay for equal work” and used centralized wage grids for wage-setting on the labor market several decades before their fall in the beginning of the 1990s
The differences between men and women during the communist era might be due to the big changes in the economy during that time, and the differences during the transition years might indicate the collapse of the socialist support for women and the changes in the economy and society, which might have changed women’s work preferences and/or opportunities
The labor market is one arena that has experienced the most market economy shocks, including the official birth of unemployment and its social implications, the restructuring process of almost all big industrial companies and the entire agricultural sector, the expansion of the private sector, the composition of employment, and a decentralized system of wage setting. All of these changes open up the question of whether the “planned equality” of the communist regime transformed into a “market inequality” during the transition years
Summary
The communist regimes in Eastern Europe institutionalized the principle of “equal pay for equal work” and used centralized wage grids for wage-setting on the labor market several decades before their fall in the beginning of the 1990s. The relative importance of the individual components of the wage decomposition varies across years, with much higher variations in both female-dominated and male-dominated occupations during the transition period.
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